So. Has a book changed my life?Absolutely. But not because they caused me to lose weight or get promoted or cure cancer or become famous and go on late night television or anything like that. Books are more subtle, I think, and they change one’s life by adding to and/or rearranging one’s mental furniture.

Changing the way a person thinks, or what they think about can ultimately change the person, and while I might still have been very similar to the Reeser you know now, I wouldn’t think or speak in quite the same way, and really wouldn’t be quite who I am now if I had never read…

…the Bible.…The Lord of The Rings.…Harry Potter.…The Sun Also Rises.…The Sound and the Fury.…The Vampire Chronicles.

There is a little bit of me that’s embarrassed to be saying that some of these particular books “changed my life”…but it would be a lie to say that they didn’t. The Reeser who had never read The Sound and the Fury was not the same as the one who came after. (The former used correct grammar and punctuation on a more regular basis.)

But yeah…out of all the hundreds of books I have read, these would be the ones I’d note as having had the most lasting effect on me. Maybe not because they got me to sit up at night, waiting for my letter from Hogwarts, or because I am super-amazing at quoting Bible verses…but because each of them has persuaded me to think about others and myself differently, and changing a person’s thoughts is no easy task.